Alien Goddess: Kat (Makaen Warriors Book 2) Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Epilogue

  From the author

  Alien Goddess: Kat

  Makaen warriors book 2

  Zina Wes

  © 2020 Zina Wes

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  Chapter 1

  “We’ve been what?”

  Kat shrieked the last word so loudly that the two blob-like aliens sitting at the next table in the dimly lit tavern stopped talking and glanced over, their transparent round eyes wide with curiosity.

  “Keep your voice down,” her brother Lirid hissed with a warning in his voice, gesturing with his eyebrows at the other table. “We don’t want to draw attention to ourselves, do we?”

  Kat flicked her gaze to the blobs and stared back at them for a few seconds. Quickly, she decided it was best to just ignore the nosy buggers. In a tavern filled with creepy menacing aliens, they seemed rather harmless. Like a plate of jelly. Of course, looks could be deceiving, but Kat reckoned that—in the very unlikely event they became agressive—she’d be able to scare them off with nothing more than a spoon. Furthermore, she had far more pressing matters to attend to.

  Turning her attention back to her brother, she closed her eyes for a brief moment and took in a deep breath in an attempt to calm her nerves. It didn’t help much, though. Biting the inside of her lip, she straightened her back and leaned her upper body over the small square table to huddle closer to the two men opposite her, Lirid to her left and their cousin Mitha to her right.

  “What do you mean we’ve been robbed?” Kat murmured through clenched teeth.

  Lirid shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know how it happened, but my space cruiser is no longer in the section of the docking bay we left it in. And before you ask, yes, I checked the entire docking bay. It’s gone. Stolen, most likely.”

  “Didn’t you lock it?” Kat asked in a high-pitched voice, frowning in disbelief and horror. How could someone just steal a space cruiser? In public?

  Lirid grimaced and gave her the most irritating stare, as if Kat had said the dumbest thing ever. She hated it when her brother did that. She loved him with all her heart, but sometimes—well, most of the time—he was such a doofus. Especially when he acted as if he knew better just because he was a few years her senior, and she was nothing more than his ignorant and incredibly stupid baby sister. This behavior had been annoying when they were children, and it was even more so now that they were grown up. Unfortunately, Lirid’s brain didn’t seem to have matured along with his body.

  “It isn’t an Earth transport vehicle, Kat.” He snorted scornfully. “Do you think I left the keys in the ignition or something and someone took it for a vehicle pleasuring ride? It doesn’t work that way.”

  “It’s called a joyride,” she corrected him with a look of disgust. “You make it sound like someone’s having sex with his car.”

  Kat deemed it wise not to mention that car sex was most likely a real thing. Some things she’d learned while she was on Earth, she’d rather forget, like how excited some men would become when they talked about their cars. Oh no, buffing your car three times a day has absolutely no sexual dimension to it at all, Bob. Yeah, right. Furthermore, she didn’t want to give her brother more ammunition to say awkward things. He was able to forget the entry code to his residence every second day, but he would remember useless stuff like this, only to blurt it out in public when you least expected it and when it was most inappropriate. No, it was best not to go into it any further.

  “Whatever,” Lirid dragged out, rolling his eyes.

  Kat wished she had never taught him that one. She wanted to smack her brother in the back of his head—he would deserve it for being such an immature idiot—but she refrained from doing so. The slapping sound might give the blob aliens another reason to stare at them again. She didn’t want that.

  “Someone must have hacked the ship’s computer,” Mitha intervened. “That’s the only way the thief could have entered the cruiser and taken off. It must have been a very skilled thief, though. Hacking a ship’s computer from the outside is extremely difficult. One wrong move and you trigger all kinds of alarms before you know it. The thief knew how to bypass every single safeguard. That’s very impressive,” he murmured, almost awestruck.

  “See?” Lirid huffed, cocking up both eyebrows and shaking his head from left to right with every word. “It wasn’t my fault.”

  Kat rubbed her fingers against her temples. She needed to focus, and her brother’s childish behavior wasn’t helping at all.

  “Okay, we lost our ship. That means we must find an alternative means of transport. Do you have enough credits to pay for our journey back to Cassidiri? Mitha and I are broke.”

  Lirid shifted uncomfortably in his seat.

  “Lirid?” Kat asked with a compelling tone in her voice, demanding an answer.

  He cleared his throat before talking.

  “Um…no. Besides the credits in my pocket, I left everything on the cruiser. I thought that would be safer considering we were coming to this place. This station is filled with criminals. I didn’t want to have my credits stolen by a pickpocket or be forced to hand everything over at knifepoint by some low-life thief.”

  Kat gasped and wiped her hands over her face, then pointed a finger to her brother.

  “So, you’re telling me we don’t have a ship or credits, and that we’re basically stranded on this more-than-dubious space station?”

  Her hands turned into fists. The urge to slap his head had changed into an urge to punch his perfectly sculpted nose.

  Why had she ever agreed to join her brother and cousin on this trip? She must have been mad. Or suicidal. As soon as the trail had led them to this space station, they should have made a U-turn and returned to Cassidiri immediately for some backup. Coming here, just the three of them, had been a disastrous decision.

  Blackway space station was the place where pirates, criminals and other lowlifes came to trade—mostly illegal merchandise—and to relax. Apparently, even criminals needed some R&R now and then. Which according to Mitha meant gambling all your credits away, getting drunk on cheap spirits, having sex with even cheaper prostitutes and getting into bar fights. None of which were on Kat’s bucket list.

  Whether or not they kept a low profile, it was obvious that the three of them didn’t belong in this lawless place. They stuck out like sore thumbs. From the very first moment they had arrived here, Kat had been afraid they would end up being molested, mutilated, murdered and eaten, not necessarily in that order.

  “I’m sure we’ll find a way back home,” Lirid uttered with
a confidence that wasn’t showing in his eyes.

  Kat lowered her shoulders with the intention of banging her head on the table but stopped when she remembered where they were. Hygiene clearly wasn’t a priority in this tavern. The tabletop was sticky with who knew what, so unless you wanted to end up with a questionable skin disease or worse, it was best not to touch anything if possible, she gathered. Instead, she lowered her head into her hands and rested her elbows on her knees.

  “We are so screwed,” she whimpered. “Big-time.”

  “At least we got the information we came here for.” Mitha squeezed Kat’s shoulder. “We know what happened to Lucas now.”

  Yes, indeed they did.

  A few weeks ago, her best friend Lucas had disappeared without a trace. Lucas was human, but he lived on Cassidiri. Kat had met Lucas when she had lived on Earth for a few years as a teenager. Kat was born on Cassidiri. Her mother was Cassidi—as the people of Cassidiri were called—but her father was human, making Kat half-human, half-Cassidi. Kat had wanted to learn more about Earth and her human relatives, and when she was sixteen, she had gotten her parents’ permission to live on Earth for a while with her grandparents from her father’s side.

  The very first day in her new school, she had met Lucas, who had volunteered to show her around. Immediately, Kat had been taken in by his stunning smile, shining brown eyes and dark hair. He had been just as quirky as she was and had made her laugh with his wacky sense of humor. Furthermore, he had understood how it was to be a child of different cultures, he himself being the child of a black father and a white mother. It had connected them, and soon it had felt as if she had known him her entire life. Before long, they had spent almost every waking moment together. Lucas had been the only person she had revealed her Cassidi origin to. She hadn’t wanted to be treated any differently, so to everyone else, she was just Kat Sinclair, human. Kat had been confident she could trust Lucas with her secret, for he was so much more than a friend; he was a kindred spirit. When Kat had gone back to Cassidiri after finishing high school a few years later, Lucas had come with her. Both his parents had been killed in a car accident when he had been only ten, and his grandmother, who had taken care of him afterwards, had passed away the year before. He also didn’t have any brothers or sisters, so there was nothing to bind him to Earth.

  Lucas, who, just like his father, loved absolutely everything about nature and wildlife, had studied biology on Cassidiri. After his graduation, he had started working for one of the Cassidirian universities as a researcher in the biology department.

  A little over two weeks ago, Lucas had gone off-planet without telling anyone, even Kat or her brother. He had left them a message stating that he had to look into something for his work and that he’d probably be back within a week. But a week had gone by without a sign of life. When he hadn’t returned after two weeks, she and her brother were so worried that they had asked Cassidirian law enforcers to investigate his disappearance. They had found out that, according to his cruiser’s signature, Lucas had gone to an uninhabited planetoid at the far edge of Cassidirian territory. Because there were no signs of foul play or accident, and Lucas was an adult and a human, which meant he fell outside Cassidirian jurisdiction, the law enforcers didn’t deem it necessary to investigate any further. They believed he would probably turn up in a few days.

  But they didn’t know Lucas as well as Kat and her brother did. Lucas would never disappear for weeks on end without telling them his whereabouts. He must be in trouble or he would have contacted them already. There was no other explanation.

  “Maybe we should ask our sister to order the law enforcers to conduct a proper investigation,” Kat had suggested to her brother after the two had learned about Lucas’s case being closed. Kat’s half-sister Ziri was the Royal Dimir of Cassidiri, aka the queen of the entire planet. She had the power to get certain things done.

  Lirid had shaken his head. “You know very well that she would never do that. Not even if we asked her personally. She doesn’t want us to get any special treatment just because she’s our sister. We have to lead by example, remember. No nepotism. What applies to non-royal citizens also applies to us. Without proof that Lucas is in trouble, no one is going to do anything.”

  Her brother had been right, Kat knew. Even though Ziri had the power to order the law enforcers to conduct a proper investigation, she wouldn’t do it. Not even for Lucas. She would never use her status to pull strings for a family member, and certainly not in dealings with the authorities. The law enforcers were supposed to be neutral at all times. For a royal, especially a queen, to interfere in their affairs was not done, a disgrace even. Ziri was too honorable for that.

  “But we can’t just sit here and do nothing. There must be something we can do.” Kat hadn’t wanted to wait any longer, as the law enforcers had suggested. Her gut had told her that Lucas was in trouble.

  Lirid had nodded, rubbing his chin. “Yes, we can do something, but we’ll need help. Try to get some sleep. I’ll explain later.”

  Without saying another word, Lirid had rushed out of her small apartment, leaving Kat with a queasy feeling in her stomach, wondering what her brother was up to now. He’d returned early the next morning, accompanied by their cousin Mitha.

  Kat was very fond of her cousin. Being almost the same age, Kat and Mitha had practically grown up together. He was the most positive and laid-back person within her inner circle. Unlike most of the Cassidi belonging to the nobility, Mitha had never been hoity-toity about his ancestry. He didn’t have a pretentious bone in his body. Kat found that a very pleasant quality, for she herself lacked the smug and arrogant gene. And if anyone Mitha cared about needed help, he was the first to lend a helping hand, no questions asked.

  “If the law enforcers won’t act, then we’re going after Lucas ourselves,” Lirid had explained, seeing Kat’s questioning gaze. “We’re taking my space cruiser and going to that planetoid to see if we can find any clues concerning Lucas’s disappearance. Do you want to come with us?”

  Kat had understood why her brother had asked Mitha to join him. Aside from being family and someone they trusted completely, out of everyone they knew, Mitha also had the most off-planet experience. After finishing school, he’d traveled the galaxy for a while, taking odd jobs here and there. He had worked on freighters, cruisers, space stations and even on a Bazarian warship scrubbing the floors. Furthermore, Lucas was his friend, too.

  Wary, she had looked from Lirid to Mitha.

  “I’m not sure this is such a good idea. We’re not detectives, and we’ve never done anything like this before. It could be dangerous. Isn’t it better if we hire someone to find Lucas for us? Someone who knows what to look for?”

  Lirid had shaken his head fiercely. “No, we’ve wasted too much time already. I have to do this. Now. I can’t wait for others to do what I should have done weeks ago. I need to find Lucas. Mitha has agreed to come with me.” His eyes were glowing with emotion. “Will you?”

  Kat had hesitated, biting her lip. She had fully appreciated her brother’s sentiments. Lucas was family. If the shoe had been on the other foot and they had been lost, Lucas wouldn’t have wavered. He would have searched for them, going to the ends of the universe if needed. And her brother had been so determined to go. There had been no stopping him. He would have gone with or without her.

  “Well, I can’t let the two of you run off without supervision, can I?” she had said somewhat jokingly after a while. “You’d probably get yourselves killed before you even reached that planetoid.”

  “So, that’s a yes?” Lirid had replied gleefully with a boyish smile on his face.

  Kat had nodded slightly, as if she still had to convince herself this was a good idea. “You’re lucky the schools are closed for vacation and I’m free from work. Give me a few minutes to pack some stuff.”

  And off they went. Two days later they were in orbit around the planetoid Lucas had gone to, which wasn’t as uninhabited
as they had been told. It had an atmosphere and there was an abundance of plants and wildlife, even though the climate seemed harsh by Cassidirian subtropical standards, with temperatures around the freezing point. But Lucas would have loved it here. Still, Kat had wondered what exactly Lucas had been looking for.

  “Do you see anything unusual?” Kat had asked her brother, who was scanning the planetoid’s surface.

  Frustrated and disappointed, Lirid had shaken his head. “No, nothing. Just a lot of plants and animals. No sign of a human or a vessel.”

  “Well, not that I believed it for a moment, but at least now we know for sure he’s not lying dead on this planetoid. That means there’s still hope.”

  “I’ve found something,” Mitha had said, tapping on his datapad. “I scanned the planetoid’s surroundings. Not counting ours, there’s a residual trace of several engine signatures. There were two or more ships near this planetoid around the same time, only a few weeks ago.”

  “Several engine signatures?” Kat had lifted up an eyebrow. “Lucas wasn’t alone?”

  “No, and it looks like the ships took off in the same direction. The traces are very faint, but we can still follow them.”

  Kat had frowned. “So we’re going to follow bread crumbs?”

  “Bread crumbs?” her brother had asked.

  Kat had waved her hand. “Never mind, it’s an Earth thing. It’s not important.” She had paused. “What shall we do—follow the trail or report this to the law enforcers?”

  “Follow the trail, of course. I’m not going all the way back to Cassidiri,” her brother had stated. “We’ve already lost too much time. Also, we don’t know if this is enough proof for the law enforcers to take action. I think it’s best if we find out where the ships went.”

  “I second that,” Mitha had added. “We have no idea how long the residual trace will be detectable. Right now, we’re talking about minute amounts, and it’s dissipating fast. This might be the only chance we get.”